Server Sending emails?

Question

Hi all there,
I have a small confusion on how a WEB_SERVER should sent emails.
What i want to do is sent an email from a Server to an User when he/she registers.
Do i have to open a Socket to my SMTP and sent the msg from there? And if yes is the Web_server supposed to be my SMTP's client?
Or do i just send the message from the Web server? If i use this approoach (much more easier than the socket part) what Ips will be displayed at the mail header my servers ips or the clients ips that executed the JSP that send the message?

Answer 1

I'm not really following all of what you're saying, but I'll answer the best I can...
I am not sure if in the header of the email that is
sent the "Recieved From" field is the IP of the
Server or the IP of the client.What do you mean by "server" and "client" here? Regardless, the easiest way to find that out is to send an email to yourself, look at the headers, and see what's what.
I can in no way force a User to login to my SMTP nor
to give my his password so that i can log his. And to
leave my SMTP open so that it doesnt check from where
the mail comes isnt good either.The user doesn't need to login to your SMTP server. Your servlet does. (Well, actually, the servlet shouldn't be doing much of anything but forwarding requests to the appropriate business objects. So your business object--that doesn't know or care whether it's in a servlet context--will log into your SMTP server). Presumably you can provide the appropriate credentials in a config file that your app can use to authenticate to your SMTP server. Or you may be able to configure your SMTP server to just always accept requests from your app's host's IP. This is how it's set up at my company when I send emails. The actual mechanics of configuring SMTP servers can be a bit of a black art though. I know diddly about it--our admins configured ours for me.
So if the ip is from the server i could somehow tell
to my SMTP to allow the mail to be sent. Or if i
should use authentication in my SMTP server.
But if the Ip is from the client i cant check.Server == your app? Client == the web browser that's contacting your servlet?
If so, then see my previous blabber. If I understand your problem correctly, you have a web app, and you want the client to be able to do something that causes email to be sent. Sounds to me like sending the email is a server-side task here, so your app can contact your SMTP server by whatever means is appropriate for that environment.
An the other hand i want the Ip of the header to be
from the client so that the message sent has "HIS
PRINT" on. You want the "received-from" header to show the client's IP? I don't think you can do that. At least, I don't know how you'd make it ultimately appear that the client's machine originated the email. You can get his IP address from the servlet request or headers--or at least the public IP address that his company or ISP is presenting.
But I don't know why you'd need that. Just ask him to enter a "from" email address and set that appropriately. You could maybe add your own X- whatever header that has his (apparent) IP address "X-MyApp-Client-IP:" or something, if you feel you need it for tracking purposes. I really don't know what you'd actually do with that IP though, except maybe use it to contact his ISP if he causes problems or something.
Do i make any sence?I think I'm kind of getting it. Not totally sure though. :-)
And to tell the truth i dont know what i want it to
be. That suggests that you don't have a pressing need for it to be any one thing (whatever "it" is), so just letting it be whatever it happens to be by doing things the most straightforward way is probably sufficient.
Having to write the Socket will force me to SEND the
email from the SMTP and not through the Java API.
There is my confusion.Mine too. I have no clue what you're saying here. Even if you make a socket connection, you won't be doing anything diferent that the JavaMail API does. It might be that you can send some data that JavaMail doesn't give you an option to send. But I'd suggest that if that's the case, there's probably a good reason JavaMail doesn't give you that option. But I'm not an expert on the guts of JavaMail or the details of SMTP, so that's just a guess.